Theatrhythm Final Fantasy is featured in the latest installment of Nintendo's Iwata's Asks interview series. Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata quizzed producer Ichiro Hazama about how the rhythm Final Fantasy game came to be.

This is Hazama's debut title. Previously, he worked on Final Fantasy VII Advent Children, although he says that he mostly served a support role to the big guys like Tetsuya Nomura, Takeshi Nozue and Kazushige Nojima.

Hazama first proposed making Theatrhythm after Advent Children had been completed. It was originally considered for Nintendo DS. However, there were issues with storage capacity and machine power, which kept the game from going into production.

When Hazama first saw the 3DS, he felt that the time had come. He immediately went to developer Indies Zero to finalize the plan for the game. He showed this to Tetsuya Nomura and received the go-ahead to start the project that same day.